I spent the weekend at Starbase Indy, a local media science fiction convention, selling digital caricatures. And finally I remembered to bring my camera. At least to show you my set up, I didn’t get out of the dealer’s room all weekend. I was kept busy Saturday and Friday and Sunday I was on-station in case of interest and to help my lovely wife sell our SF fan garage sale stuff.
Since the Starbase Indy fundraising party I’ve added the monitor to draw in interest.
I met Ray Park, the Guest of Honor. Very nice man, he told me the caricature I did of him was the best he’s had done.
I decided to paint at the IAC open model session Sunday afternoon.
This was a 15 minute pose.
This was a 50 minute pose in two 25 minute sessions.
I was reminded of the need to have both your palette and your canvas either white or a middle value. My palette is a middle value but I hadn’t the time to stain the canvas pad sheets a middle value so whenever I mixed a value on the palette that I saw in the figure, when I placed it on the white canvas it was much darker! That effect calmed down when I laid in that black around the head and shoulders but it was certainly disconcerting!
And so, it’s finished. And surprisingly it’s dry. Dry enough at least to put a coat of a new type of varnish over it for protection. (Most oils paintings should remain unvarnished for six months to a year to be sure all the thick paint is dry down to the canvas. I’m still not a “thick painter” so my canvases dry faster.) I’ll varnish it tomorrow.
I also built a frame for display purposes. This painting will be displayed and presented at the STARBASE INDY convention this weekend so I wanted it to look nice while on display. Framing is a personal decision so I don’t impose my ideas of a frame onto a client. They can get it framed to their tastes and I’ll reuse this one.
These are monochromatic umber underpainting exercises. Basically the beginning stage of a portrait or other type of painting but I use them as ways to better develop my realistic rendering to avoid the natural bend to exaggerate as in a caricature. Sometime down the road I may add color to these but for the moment this was the desired end result.
This one took about an hour, three twenty minute sessions, of careful measuring and rendering.
This one about 40 minutes.
The next morning at the Art Center where I usually draw I decided to continue the exercise.
The lighter ones to the left are two minute poses. The right ones started out as two minute poses but when the model took his 15 and then 20 minute poses his head happened to be in the same positions, relative to me, allowing me to further develop them.
A twenty minute pose.
Another twenty minute pose, this time I roughly added the pure colors I saw within his skin tones with no thought to blending them into a more uniform flesh tone.
Now I’m at the stage where everything is painted in and I’m looking at the entire canvas, judging balance and looking for small (hopefully) screw-ups to fix and things to adjust. I thought her jacket was looking too blue-ish so I laid a darker glaze over it. (Some of what you see in this photo on both of their coats are shiny reflections from the lights in the studio. Unavoidable with oil paints.)
Boob Job
Speaking of screw-ups, there was an alignment problem with the previous cleavage so I repainted that area.
Much nicer! (ahem, well - moving on…)
Pistol
The pistol butt I painted yesterday was too large.
Glasses for the gentleman, then some clothes and the beginnings of a gun belt and pistol butt.
Saturday night I drove up to Lafayette, Indiana to draw for three hours at a birthday party for two 16 year old girls.
The Birthday girls.
LADIES FIRST
The previous session I finished up the hands after I took the close-up shot of the heads.
Today I added the glasses to the female face (I asked first!) then moved on to the costuming.
Now we’re having fun!
Today I started on scumbling in some basic facial modeling, added a thumb and painted the “hogs-leg” sawed off Winchester firearm in the females upraised hand. The facial scumbling is sort of a preliminary feeling out of painting the faces. It will all be lost as soon as I start applying color but I find it a good step to familiarize myself with the faces. I would have gone on to painting the faces but I got distracted by that gun, I wanted to get it done. As it turns out it will be the only gun in the painting. After the line drawing was approved the principals decided the pistol in the man’s hand looked odd out of the holster. I couldn’t change the drawing on the canvas since it has been fixed (sprayed with fixative) then the brown wash applied and there was no point in it anyway, I’ll make the change in the painting stage. To make that hand look more at home I added the thumb hooked into the pants.
The background is just about there. Of course when I get the figures laid in and they begin to develop I may have to go back in and adjust the values of the background again. And when I get back to it tomorrow I’ll probably fiddle with the background for another day.
I didn’t know that the pose last week would carry
over into this week! That’s the trouble with finishing an hour earlier
than the session lasts. So I painted her again. This time on top of an
umber under-painting I did months ago, which I just happened to bring with me because the canvas size matched that of the blank canvas and my wet canvas carrier needs two canvases to work. Of course I finished by nine
so I have no idea what’s happening next week!
